Keyword extraction: Issues and methods

Abstract Due to the considerable growth of the volume of text documents on the Internet and in digital libraries, manual analysis of these documents is no longer feasible. Having efficient approaches to keyword extraction in order to retrieve the ‘key’ elements of the studied documents is now a necessity. Keyword extraction has been an active research field for many years, covering various applications in Text Mining, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing, and meeting different requirements. However, it is not a unified domain of research. In spite of the existence of many approaches in the field, there is no single approach that effectively extracts keywords from different data sources. This shows the importance of having a comprehensive review, which discusses the complexity of the task and categorizes the main approaches of the field based on the features and methods of extraction that they use. This paper presents a general introduction to the field of keyword/keyphrase extraction. Unlike the existing surveys, different aspects of the problem along with the main challenges in the field are discussed. This mainly includes the unclear definition of ‘keyness’, complexities of targeting proper features for capturing desired keyness properties and selecting efficient extraction methods, and also the evaluation issues. By classifying a broad range of state-of-the-art approaches and analysing the benefits and drawbacks of different features and methods, we provide a clearer picture of them. This review is intended to help readers find their way around all the works related to keyword extraction and guide them in choosing or designing a method that is appropriate for the application they are targeting.